The Prestige Pulls A Rabbit From US Weekend Box Office Hat

Usually when you think of magic you either think of the dudes with the giant magician-mauling tiger or smug Americans divving around in big bubbles of water for a week, but The Prestige has changed all that.

The Prestige, Christopher Nolan's movie about duelling magicians in the 1900s, is top movie at the US weekend box office this week, having beaten off challenges from the likes of Martin Scorsese's The Departed and Clint Eastwood's Flags Of Our Fathers. We're not sure what's weirder - the fact that the top three movies at the US weekend box office are all intelligent dramas and not popcorn-filled nonsense, or the fact that The Prestige's success at the US weekend box office means that David Bowie is a proper film star again. Bring on The Linguini Incident 2: The Magic Wand Years, we say.

Now that The Prestige is number one at the US weekend box office, other studios will no doubt be looking for other stories about magic to adapt into movies to plug into this new-found public demand. And we've got just the ticket - a movie adaptation of the Paul Daniels blog. It'd be great - picture this: a tiny bald magician drives around in his car complaining about Europe and how the Angel Of The North isn't very good and why he isn't on television any more. Anyone? No? Here's the US weekend box office top five:

1 - The Prestige (Although The Prestige is an intelligently plotted, superbly paced drama that keeps audiences guessing up until the last minute, we can't shake the feeling that somewhere down the line it was pitched as 'Batman fights Wolverine while Alfie and Jareth The Goblin King look on and Scarlett Johansson sticks her boobs out a bit') $14,818,00

2 - The Departed (Proving once and for all that Jack Nicholson's prosthetic penis will be the subject of about six million jokes, three or four funny songs and one ridiculously inappropriate statue appendage come Oscar night) $13,765,000

3 - Flags Of Our Fathers (Only number three? Clint Eastwood will be disappointed. If only Flags Of Our Fathers contained more scenes of pretty female soldiers chewing off their own tongues, perhaps it would have been the hit everyone expected) $10,200,000

4 - Open Season (And this is the way it should be; a US weekend box office that contains a discourse about the similarities between moviemaking and old-school magic, a slick return to form by one of Hollywood's greatest-ever directors, a movie about an iconic photograph that also acts as a mirror to the current conflict in Iraq and a funny cartoon about a one-antlered deer with the voice of a man who gave a Nazi a blowjob in The Butterfly Effect) $8,000,000

5 - Flicka (Hooray! A film about a web application. Personally we can't wait until Pandora: The Motion Picture or Gliffy Escapes! to be released either) $7,700,000

Read more:

Weekend Box Office - Box Office Mojo

[story by Stuart Heritage]